


Despite All My Rage

by Redrikki



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Clones, Gen, Human Experimentation, Kidnapping, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4318914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/pseuds/Redrikki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel is still just a rat in a cage.  So much for self-directed evolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Despite All My Rage

Later in life, Rachel will tell people that she was always self aware but really it is here, waking up locked in a hideous pink room at Dyad, that she learns the truth. The truth is this:

Her parents are dead.  
Her parents were actually her creators.  
She wasn’t their daughter; she was their experiment.  
She is now Aldous Leekie’s experiment.  
No, she can’t go home.  
Dyad is her home now.

It will be nearly a year before they let her out of the room where she learned her entire life was a lie. Walking freely down Dyad’s halls with Aldous and her bodyguards, Rachel will feel strange and frighteningly exposed.

*****

Rachel learns about the others later. She is one of several hundred identical girls scattered across Europe and the Americas. Aldous shows her pictures of them at home, at play, with the people they believe are their parents. “You’re the only one who knows,” Aldous assures her. 

Their faces are just like her’s, only happy and smiling. “Why me?”

“You’re different. Special.”

The other girls think they are free, safe, loved. Rachel should pity them their ignorance. She hates them instead. Every single one.

*****

Outside of Dyad’s walls (but not its control), her fellow clones fumble their way through their schooling, past the obstacles of poor romantic choices and recreational drug use. Rachel, meanwhile, carefully constructs a meticulous academic plan with courses in science, business, and several relevant languages. She throws in some arts for good measure and fencing for fitness. Rachel excels at everything she touches.

“I’m proud of you,” says Aldous. “You’re really taking control, directing our own evolution.”

Rachel smiles thinly. There are, after all, certain advantages to knowing one’s place in the world.

Over the next ten years, Rachel solidifies her position. While her fellow clones become schoolteachers, beauticians, lowlife criminal reprobates, she develops a reputation for frightening competence and ruthless efficiency. She cultivates allies among Topside and uncovers dirt to hold against her underlings. As the others try (and fail) to start families with the mates Dyad has carefully selected for them, Rachel dominates both the company-approved monitors she has chosen and the secret lovers they know nothing about. 

Dyad eliminates clones as they become dangerously self-aware. It stands by and watches as they die of a strange autoimmune disease and at the hands of a mysterious killer. As far as their creators are concerned, each of these women are expendable. Rachel is not. She is different: she has power. 

*****

Then Sarah Manning happens. Sarah, who was never under Dyad’s control until she decided to steal Beth Childs’ life. Sarah, who is self-aware, who has a child. She is different from the others and she threatens everything Rachel has built for herself. 

She does, however, bring Ethan Duncan back into Rachel’s life and the whole week is one of revelation. Her father is alive and he loves her. Aldous Leekie is a lying, murdering kidnapper. For a moment, Rachel thinks she can recapture that feeling of love and safety that Aldous destroyed all those years ago. They are conversing over tea in her dead mentor’s office when Professor Duncan dispels that notion.

“You are all barren by design,” he tells her. They were never designed to have choices, like actual people.

“I suppose you can’t have a created a reproducing prototype, could you?” Rachel is distantly surprised by how calm she sounds given the storm raging inside her. “That would be irresponsible, which is unforgivable.” Aldous was right about this man: he is her creator, not her father. The revelation is like a pencil in the eye.

It is a long climb back up from that. It is like an extended flashback to her first few months with Dyad, only this time Rachel’s own body is a trap. A lesser woman might break, but Rachel has always been nothing if not adaptable. She still has enough leverage and allies to get herself out of here. Nearly everyone at Dyad and topside believe her dead and, if all goes well, she will be a free woman for the first time in her life. 

*****

Rachel wakes up locked in an opulent room in a Neolutionist compound. This is not Taiwan and her new, white eye is not the one she was promised. It is here that she learns the truth:

She has been lied to and betrayed (again).  
Susan Duncan is still alive.  
Susan Duncan is her creator, not her mother.  
Rachel is now, and always has been, someone else’s experiment.

So much for self-directed evolution.

**Author's Note:**

> Title come from Smashing Pumpkins' "Bullet with Butterfly Wings."


End file.
